VLADIMIR PUTIN: Good evening, friends.

We are meeting on the eve of a very sorrowful date, when thousands of Jews and Turkic individuals were killed in Sevastopol in 1942. In Russia, we are quite familiar with the tragedy of the Holocaust: six million Jews were exterminated on the territory of the Soviet Union and in European nations. At the same time, we are well aware that Jewish individuals fought Nazism in the ranks of the Red Army – they served as political officers as well as ordinary soldiers, doctors, and overall, made a worthy input into the fight against fascism. But the tragedy of the Jewish people certainly holds a special place among the crimes committed by the Nazis during World War II. I repeat, here in Russia, we know about this and feel that pain as no one else, because as you know, more than 20 million Soviet citizens, the majority of them Russians, died during the fight against fascism.

I remember when I visited the Yad Vashem museum in Israel; the experience really affected me. Everything was created with such great talent and was so penetrating that nobody can be left feeling indifferent. Following the Jewish community’s initiative, we have created our own museum – the Tolerance Museum in Moscow. In my view, in some ways, it might have illustrated the events of the Second World War and the tragedy of the Jewish people even more brightly.